Re: It is time for the UK to think like an emerging market
Posted: November 24th, 2023, 2:52 pm
Lootman wrote:ReformedCharacter wrote:Technically minded friends connecting their parents' phones with an acoustic coupler to use bulletin boards, must have been the early 80's. Online banking, I think Bank of Scotland were early providers, which is why I now have a BoS account, late 80's. At work, an Amstrad PC clone with 'integrated software' (Smartware) which included comms. Used with a 1200 bps modem and a subscription to a service (I've forgotten the name, unfortunately) which provided a gateway to other services, such as sending text to a fax. I used one service to do typesetting, read manual and select font, spacing etc. and 'upload' to provider. The high quality output was returned by post and one hoped one hadn't made a formatting error because you would only know when you opened the post That must have been late 80's.
I started using the internet in 1996.
The origins of the internet might have been in the government/military but it only became usable by the average person with the advent of stuff developed by the private sector. So for example Netscape, Amazon, Google and various email providers can all be traced back to the mid-1990s. And by the late 1990s we had a full-on dotcom boom and bubble.
So unless you were a techie, the internet started with an explosion of private sector companies in the mid-1990s making it usable and valuable to the average non-techie.
Yes, which is why a lot of younger people refer to the internet when they really mean the world wide web since they had never come across it before the advent of all those commercial websites.
As to Netscape it owes its existence to the NCSA and the University of Illinois. The NCSA and the University of Illinois developed the Mosaic web browser before those staff left to setup the commercial company which became Netscape.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)
Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)[8] at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign beginning in late 1992. NCSA released it in 1993,[10] and officially discontinued development and support on January 7, 1997.[11]
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Marc Andreessen, the leader of the team that developed Mosaic, left NCSA and, with James H. Clark, one of the founders of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), and four other former students and staff of the University of Illinois, started Mosaic Communications Corporation. Mosaic Communications eventually became Netscape Communications Corporation, producing Netscape Navigator. Mosaic's popularity as a separate browser began to decrease after the 1994 release of Netscape Navigator, the relevance of which was noted in The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML: "Netscape Communications has designed an all-new WWW browser Netscape, that has significant enhancements over the original Mosaic program."[19]: 332
Indeed many of these commercial internet companies started out as research projects at universities
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google
Google has its origins in "BackRub", a research project that was begun in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California.[2] The project initially involved an unofficial "third founder", Scott Hassan, the lead programmer who wrote much of the code for the original Google Search engine, but he left before Google was officially founded as a company;[3][4] Hassan went on to pursue a career in robotics and founded the company Willow Garage in 2006.[5][6] Craig Nevill-Manning was also invited to join Google at its formation but declined and then joined a little later on.[7]